There is a common misconception among the non-cognoscenti that being an ultra football fan equates to being a thug. For from it, argues Swedish Ragnhild Ekner, herself an avowed fan of IFK Göteborg. Being an ultra is simply about unflinching, communal and very vocal devotion to the team, whether that be in Sweden, Morocco, Argentina or Indonesia.
Ekner’s film Ultras, receiving its international premiere in Nyon, starts with an anecdote. She recalls how she once overheard a dad in Sweden boasting to her daughter how he had secured for them VIP tickets for the big match. But the daughter was unimpressed. “I want to be over there where it is dangerous,” she said, pointing to the stands.
Danger is, of course, a relative term. The stand where the Swedish ultras were congregating was a place of union and shared passion, and as likely to be populated by women as men, and kids as well. For danger, therefore, read unbridled fidelity which is multiplied exponentially by it being experienced within a vast crowd of fellow-minded fellow ultras.
Nor is it a solely European phenomenon. I grew up assuming that ultras were exclusively Italian, as seen and heard on the terraces of Napoli or Lazio. Wrong.
Ekner takes us to Indonesia, where the Sleman ultras sing a song of such devotion as to bring tears to your eyes, such is its passion and power. In Argentina, a woman could only find peace following the death of her son when she returned to the Nueva Chicago stadium to absorb the love from her fellow devotees. In the UK, one Manchester City fan was so disgusted by the gentrification of the Premier League football experience that he turned to non-league football (Eastbourne United) to reach again the giddy heights of ultra fandom.
In the film, the director herself delivers a paean to the ‘ultra’ experience that reads like pure lyric. “An act of resistance. An uprising against loneliness. A defiance of logic to spend your energy on something that is not absolutely necessary. It’s driven by something else. It is the intoxicating power. It is the greatest consolation. It is the only constant. It is the best security. It is the ultimate euphoria. It is the strongest companionship. It is the radical happiness.”
“I wanted to create a love letter to this phenomenon,” Ekner adds to BDE of her desire to explain the ‘ultra’ appeal. “Give it the energy that I feel in the stadium, give it a body or some kind of shape. Also to connect the energies from the stadiums from around the world so supporters [can] watch the film and feel that they are part of something big or powerful. Part of a force.”
There is a political dimension to being an ultra as well, the film points out, in defying the quasi-autocratic powers of the state, or the police. “The stadium is a testing ground for repression,” says one FC Bari (Italy) supporter who points out the suspicion felt by the authorities towards this vocal and defiant subculture. “And it spreads into the cities because the stadium is a mirror of society.”
And then there is tragedy. One Egyptian fan came to despise the authorities after the infamous politically-oriented Port Said riot of February 1 2012 when 74 supporters of Al Alhy were murdered (stabbed, thrown from the stadium roof, attacked in ambulances) by ultras of the rival Al Masry team. The Al Alhy ultras had been instrumental as a first line of defence against the police and military during the Egyptian popular revolution of January 25, just a week before, and now it was pay-back time. Numerous police officers were implicated in the attacks. What’s more, the authorities had locked the exits so there was no possibility of escape from the stadium.
Director Ekner had to overcome many hurdles in completing her film, not least finding a replacement for the “perfect” Napoli ultra who pulled his entertaining contribution from the film, necessitating a change of tack towards the Bari contributor. Likewise, she drew a total blank from FC Poznań in Poland after a series of appeals via Instagram. When she received permission to shoot in Poland – there is an amazing scene in which a vast banner is unfurled over the heads of the thousands of supporters across an entire stand – she eventually met a guy who queried (via her Polish cinematographer) what she was doing. When he was satisfied with the response, he subsequently made a few phone calls to find Ekner an articulate and informed Polish ultra who eventually became part of the film.
The vibe in the film is, aside from the Egyptian chapter, light and quite often joyous. “Yes, you want to be hated by your rivals,” Ekner laughs of the vocal and highly performative processes of dissing opposing teams while idolising your own. But the antipathy is generally contained. “I also have really close friends from rival teams. It’s just the match days or during the games when the hate is real – but it’s also just a game.”
A lot of the time, being an ultra means not even seeing the game, what with the overhead banners and the communal singing, but there is another side of fandom which is all to do with encyclopaedic knowledge about, and recall of, the beautiful game.
“There are some mega-nerds who remember every match from the last 20 years, and the results and who played where and who got hurt in the knee or whatever,” Ekner describes a type of supporter whose exacting standards she could never match. “I’m the one that mixes everything up. I’m not high on the scale of nerdiness. But I am high on the scale of emotions,” she ends.
